Emma Donoghue - Passions Between Women

Contents

Introduction

During their devoted partnership of over twenty years, Queen Anne sent Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, endless loving letters. These tend to conclude with the words passionately or most passionately and tenderly yours, or by assuring Sarah of Annes sincere, passionate heart or a most Were these two uses of the word passion one describing a respectable friendship, the other a sexual perversion entirely separate? Or can we find, between these two extremes, a wide spectrum of interpretations of passion between women?

Only a year before, Sarah Churchill had accused Queen Anne of allowing her favourite Lady of the Bedchamber, Abigail Hill Masham, too much political influence and personal intimacy. How can Anne keep harping on the purity of her reputation, Sarah asks in a letter, after having discoverd so great a passion for such a woman, for sure there can be noe great reputation in a thing so strange & unaccountable, to say This third kind of passion can be placed about halfway along the spectrum. Though Sarah cannot quite dare to call the relationship with Abigail a sexual affair to the queens face, she implies that it is at the very least suspicious and damaging to Annes reputation.

Lesbian history has often been impoverished by rigid divisions between friendship and sex, social acceptability and deviance, innocence and experience. This book sets out to discuss the full range of representations of lesbian culture in British print between 1668 and 1801, in a variety of discourses, from the poetic to the medical, the libertine to the religious. Although nowadays the word passion tends to refer to sexual love, in the period between the Restoration and the nineteenth century it still retained multiple connotations of strong feeling, interest, anger, grief, enthusiasm, sexless as well as sexual love. Not every text discussed in this book presents passion between women as specifically sexual, or as invariably benevolent, but almost all highlight its intensity. Whether these early writers denounced it as a sexual crime or glorified it as a moral pinnacle, they tended to agree in marking it off from milder, more familial female bonds.

It should be possible, then, to broaden the meaning of lesbian history to include a variety of concepts from previous centuries without diluting it into a study of all forms of sisterly affection. This book aims to explore the range of meanings given to passions between women in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British publications.

What lesbians do in dictionaries

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed out that one of the favourite arguments of academics who want to dismiss the history of same-sex relations goes like this: since there was no language about them, they must

Passions Between Women sets out to show that generations of writers and commentators did indeed perceive some women who loved women as a distinct sexual and social group. And to assume, as Brown does, that women-lovers were incapable of perceiving that they belonged to such a group is to underestimate them. The lack of explicit acknowledgement in surviving personal papers is no proof of a lack of perception; the women/s own discretion and desire for privacy, as well as the censoring actions of families and scholars, would have ensured that most passions between women were presented in letters and memoirs as harmless and innocent. A good example of such a veiled life, from a slightly later period than the one covered in this book, is Anne Lister (17911840), who lived, like many other women of the gentry, in a circle of passionate friendships. Only her diaries, decoded and published in part during recent years, reveal that these were sexual relationships and that she and her friends knew themselves to be (in Listers words)

Passions Between Women is urgently committed to dispelling the myth that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lesbian culture was rarely registered in language and that women who fell in love with women had no words to describe themselves. Silences can be interesting and significant, but this book is not about silence. What we are beginning to discover is that early texts are full of words the dictionary-makers have not noticed, specific labels for women who would be called lesbian or bisexual if they were living now. These seventeenth- and eighteenth-century words do not seem to refer only to isolated sexual but to the emotions, desires, styles, tastes and behavioural tendencies that can make up an identity. Certainly, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the sexologists cemented a selection of such elements into the stereotype called the lesbian (tall, flat-chested, intellectual, frustrated); however, a wide variety of lesbian types had been described in texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The compilers of the OED assume that early uses of the word Lesbian/lesbian, especially if the poet Sappho is mentioned, simply mean of or pertaining to the island of Lesbos. Similarly, they gloss Sapphic/Saphic as of or pertaining to Sappho the famous poetess of Lesbos and give a list of examples, the adjective in every case describing the metre or quality of poems. But in 1732 William Kings mock epic The Toast referred to sexual relationships between women

Tribade, another word of Greek origin, was adopted into both French and were also derived from Latin and Greek verbs for rubbing; they became diluted in meaning over the centuries and in English usually referred to any sexually loose woman.

A tribade was often described as having a female member (imagined as either a prolapsed vagina or an enlarged clitoris) which allowed her to have penetrative intercourse with other women. This member was seen as a phallic or male organ, making her double-sexed, or at least visually indistinguishable from the truly double-sexed. So it is under the words hermaphrodite, female hermaphrodite, or pseudo-hermaphrodite that we often find discussions of lesbian Hermaphroditical was not an exact synonym for lesbian, then, but a sister concept; the female hermaphrodite and the tribade were overlapping figures.

Spicy synonyms were provided by other European languages for instance, that unnatural Act the Spaniards call Donna con Donna

We also find some specifically English slang. The Game of Flats is how a satirical pamphlet of 1749 describes the Tommy seems to have been a home-grown slang word for a woman who had sex with women. The first such use I have found is in a satire of 1773. The anonymous writer threatens to expose particular deviants in print:

Tommy may derive from tom boy, tom lad or tom rig, all names for boyish, uncontrollable girls, or indeed from other phrases in which tom suggested masculinity. By the mid-nineteenth century, tom meant a masculine woman of the town or prostitute; by the 1880s it referred to a woman who does not care for the society of others than those Tom(my) is just one example of how an unbroken slang tradition can go unrecorded by the OED.

Each of these words was used in a different context, and in some cases survives only in one or two sources, so it is very difficult to work out why a writer would choose one term rather than another. Randolph Trumbach asserts that Sapphist and tommy were the high and low terms for women, as sodomite and but we need more examples of their use to be sure of this distinction. What is suggested by the fact that there was a variety of explicit words for lesbianism in this period is that there was no consensus on the meaning of womens passion for each other. Pockets of knowledge about possibilities for eroticism between women seem to have been scattered right across British culture, but the words, the stories, were isolated from each other. Attitudes varied wildly; the same woman could be considered by different observers an innocent romantic friend, a pseudo-hermaphrodite or tribade with partial responsibility for her abnormal anatomy, or a sinful Lesbian, Sapphist or tommy.